4X The Unsurpassed Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri thread

[attackfighter]

I'm also playing the Thinker Mod.

I've done numerous playthroughs, but am currently playing as Datajack Roze. She starts with Planned economics available. I implemented it as soon as I could afford it, and it seems particularly useful at the start for spamming colony pods. Even bases with 1-nutrient squares can pretty much pump out colony pods continuously. It also makes getting the important early-game Secret Projects more reliable. I always feel the pinch as Santiago and the power as Yang with that sweet 10% industry bonus. Roze gets it too, sort of.

I also started next to Santiago and Miriam. Here's a weird twist: I'm going to run Fundamentalism, ally with Miriam, and beat up Santiago with her. People always complain about Miriam, forgetting that there's this option to join her fun...

One thing Alpha Centauri is helping me do is purge my popamole instincts. I'm playing it with no savescumming this time around. I've already lost two colony pods to mind worms. I sucked it up. This adds to the narrative element. It gives insight into the atmosphere the devs were going for. AC is about survival - the struggle to survive on a weird, hostile alien planet. Savescumming robs you of this sense of darkness and foreboding.

The Thinker Mod is great, though. Ordinarily I play a few games of AC, get bored of it, and forget about it for many years. This time, I'm cranking out games really quickly - there's depth to it now. Your decisions count. It's helpful that I can rely on automated formers and governors to play fast, too. There's no longer as much grind.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Oh shit, this Thinker Mod is great. Last time I tried it was like 10 years ago and didnt felt much different but now it's awesome. Not only the AI is kicking me ass, but it's doing it "in-character" for their personalities. The mod also has a ton of improvements on vanilla (like the expiration of probe infiltration, for eg). So, questions:

1) what else am I missing? Any other neat improvements?

2) what is the recommended difficulty setting? Tried it on Thinker and was pulverized. Perhaps I should go back to normal (Librarian)?

3) Is there a way to re-insert the game intro? The mod seems to have cut it out.

Been a good while since I checked out Thinker, how different it is nowadays?

 

[Silva]

Been a good while since I checked out Thinker, how different it is nowadays?

Can't say as I'm just halway through my first game, but the Thinker AI seems pretty smart. I tried it a couple levels below Transcendi and it kicked my ass hard (I'm last place in the rank), which was a rare thing in vanilla for me. It seems fairly good at rushing facilities and projects, denying easy (abusive) tech trading by the player, designing better specialized units for wars, and prioritizing the OP techs (like Tree Farm, industrial Automation, etc), all the while playing by the rules, so no cheating. And the mod has it's own customizable .ini file that allows a buncho tweaks from how faithful the AI stays to ideologies to colony pods spawning thresholds to the number of squares between cities it will build, etc. so one can tweak it to taste.

I also noticed some subtle rule changes, like delaying drone riots for a turn so the AI don't get "riot locked", the expiration of probe infiltration as cited above based on factions atributes (I guess it's Probe vs Probe+Police? Infiltratin Lal gave me 19 turns turns while Mirian only 10), or the research costs that are longer but reduced by things like how many of your allies have that tech, etc. I'm sure there are more. I've found those changes very smart and respectful to the spirit of the game, YMMV.

I'm sure the honey moon will be over once I find some bugs hehe. But it's a hell of a good job regardless. Edit: it's by Induktio right?

 

[Silva]

I'm also playing the Thinker Mod.

I've done numerous playthroughs, but am currently playing as Datajack Roze. She starts with Planned economics available. I implemented it as soon as I could afford it, and it seems particularly useful at the start for spamming colony pods. Even bases with 1-nutrient squares can pretty much pump out colony pods continuously. It also makes getting the important early-game Secret Projects more reliable. I always feel the pinch as Santiago and the power as Yang with that sweet 10% industry bonus. Roze gets it too, sort of.

I also started next to Santiago and Miriam. Here's a weird twist: I'm going to run Fundamentalism, ally with Miriam, and beat up Santiago with her. People always complain about Miriam, forgetting that there's this option to join her fun...

One thing Alpha Centauri is helping me do is purge my popamole instincts. I'm playing it with no savescumming this time around. I've already lost two colony pods to mind worms. I sucked it up. This adds to the narrative element. It gives insight into the atmosphere the devs were going for. AC is about survival - the struggle to survive on a weird, hostile alien planet. Savescumming robs you of this sense of darkness and foreboding.

The Thinker Mod is great, though. Ordinarily I play a few games of AC, get bored of it, and forget about it for many years. This time, I'm cranking out games really quickly - there's depth to it now. Your decisions count. It's helpful that I can rely on automated formers and governors to play fast, too. There's no longer as much grind.

Welcome to the club. I play all my strategy games on Ironman these days. It makes the experience much more tense and decisive. I can't go back to savescumming after that.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, native life being actually deadly is a huge part of why Alpha Centauri remains fun and games are unique. You can never be completely safe while maintaining good expansion and can't just do the same build orders every game. The one game that I think does it even better is Master of Magic but Alpha Centauri is up there.

For fungus, I recommend having your formers make sensors, they'll prevent adjacent fungus from having the potential to spawn Mind Worms whenever you're moving into it. The defense boost also makes your cities garrisons pretty safe on the defensive. A good reason why you can never have too many formers at any point in the game. On the other hand there's definitely valid strategies in trying to trigger spawns either for captures or for generating energy by killing them. I'm not sure how efficient or reliable that is though.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Screw you guys, all this talk made me download SMAC and Thinker.
Lmao my game crashes if Resolution is 1366x768, I have to use lower resolutions. That said, 1280x720 are not showing the topestmost screen for some reason.

Quite many interesting additions to the game.

Started a random -> Hive game in a Very Huge map (based btw)
Its 2230s MY and hilariously, I am apparently so far from everyone else (and also, so primitive because I went for Tech Stag setting) that I haven't met anybody in over a century. I would send out Scout Rovers or something, except I don't have that tech either.
Snagged Command Nexus, which is helping a lot in fighting the native life.
Got the Unity wreckage, which did help me quite a bit. I know where everyone else is, but they're still so far away lol.
I am the second weakest faction, but between my immense wealth reserves and my "large military" (boatloads of scout patrols to fight Fungal Towers lol), I am showing up as the strongest in Wealth and Military.
Once I get rid of all those damn Fungal Towers, its going to be non-stop expansion - first until I hit the southern map border which is close to me, then north.

Strangely the strongest one of all people are the Morganites. Must have gotten the Moonsoon Jungle or something.

So here I am, in splendid isolation, just building up and carving my own little collectivistic utopia away from everyone else... even through something tells me I am quite technologically behind everyone else.

 

[Average Manatee]

If/When you get to see other civs post their maps. I'd be interested to see how well Thinker develops cities when it has tons of room to grow and not much pressure from neighbors

 

[Silva]

What are some good settings for playing on Normal or Large map size in Thinker? Induktio, Average Manatee and attackfighter

I see the .ini settings are universal/disregard map size, like the Tech speed (which seems pretty slow by default) and threshold for AI to halt colony pods production (50 bases by default). I have the impression those numbers work better for bigger maps sizes (Very large and Humongous), but not necessarily on Normal or Large? I mean, with less bases the research output will be slower and the tech progress could get really slow, no? Same for the bases threshould where 50 seems pretty excessive for the default size. Exceptuating Sveensgaard which is sea-based, there's not even enough land in Default map size for each faction to build 50 bases, thus potentially wasting their time and resources.

TL;DR: Should I reduce those settings - speeding up research and decreasing bases theshold - while playing on Normal or Large sized maps?

 

[Average Manatee]

Personally I play on stagnant tech which is much slower than normal. I'm not sure what normal tech speed is. Generally speaking if you optimize terraforming and economy right you can tech up very quickly even with fairly moderate amounts of land and bases (see my post a few pages ago). Early game is just always slow as you're prioritizing minerals rather than energy. 50 bases, if they weren't all rioting due to bureaucracy, would be teching up multiple techs per turn easily. I don't think having a 50 base limit is going to hurt the AI on smaller maps, its just an upper limit.

EDIT: Also, always remember that raising land with terraformers is a valid strategy to make more bases. An army of terraformers can basically always find something to do. Granted you can also make sea bases but... urghh sea bases.

 

[attackfighter]

I like to decrease base numbers by making the minimum space between bases three tiles rather than Thinker's default two. I'm not sure what all the nuances are in how it affects gameplay, but it feels better to me.

 

[Average Manatee]

Alpha Centauri is pretty flexible about base spacing due to how crawlers act to let you mine many squares at once.

Pros of fewer bases:
- More space means less bureaucracy which means less drones to police. In base SMAX this doesn't matter too much if you can use your SPs/SEs/etc well because you could police and force talents up enough to always ignore this, but in Thinker there's a "superdrone" concept which AFAIK means you always have to police enough or there's riots.
- More production directed to fewer colonies means you need to repeat fewer facilities in each base and the multipliers they provide are more effective.
- Way less micro to deal with.

Cons of fewer bases:
- Every base produces inherent resources as soon as its placed from the home square which requires no pops to work. Recycling tanks add to this. This means a lot of extra stuff early game. Especially if you're, say, Morgan with a massive economy bonus.
- Every base lets you maintain more units, effectively adding +1 mineral production per unit more you maintain.
- In the late mid game/End game, running full food and specialists is the way to play. Since base sizes are capped and satellites can provide half your needs, eventually every base is (ideally) only crawling 2 food squares and 1 borehole for minerals. This can let you really rush ahead in growth if you plan for it and plant those new bases inside your territory to skyrocket population.

Could go either way:
- More bases lets you spread out your pollution more and stay green. Can be good or bad because 1. Killing stacks of natives for credits is a valid if a bit of a constant annoyance, and 2. Causing global warming kind of auto-wins the game since the AIs don't deal with it well while you can pre-raise all your land.

 

[Silva]

Does Thinker change the threshold of efficiency per cities? EDIT: I think it's called Bureaucracy. I could swear in vanilla it's 6 or 7 cities until you start incurring efficiency penalties and random drones, but here I received the notification when I reached 12 cities?

Can you confirm that Induktio ? If so, what's the reasoning for the change? I actually liked the low threshold as it seemed to mitigate the ICS/infinite city spawn a bit.

 

[passerby]

Bureaucracy drones are dependent on the map size.

 

[Average Manatee]

Map size, efficiency, and difficulty all affect it: https://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Bureaucracy

Don't think Thinker makes any huge changes to that formula if it changes it at all

 

[Silva]

I just noticed trhe Bureaucracy threshold is dynamic/not fixed and varies not only by map size but also your Efficiency rating. So playing the same map and same faction can mean different thresholds depending on your current EFF:

BaseLimit = (8 - Difficulty) * (4 + Efficiency) * MapRoot / 2

..where Difficulty is 0 to 5 (Drone to Transcendi) and MapRoot is 1 for default size

It's weird anyway because I'm with Yang and zero (0) Efficiency rating, so I should have a very low threshold in default map and not the (12) that popped up.

EDIT: ok, nervermind. I thought I was playing on Librarian difficulty but I'm actually on Talent. So the calculation for me is right, 12 bases threshold. Thinker didn't change this at all. Move along faggots.

 

[Average Manatee]

Keep in mind that going over only progressively adds drones, starting for your largest bases IIRC. So its not like you plant down 1 base and suddenly have +1 drones everywhere. I believe the way it works is that you only reach +1 drone at every base once you get to the point where you are 1 away from hitting the next threshold. Then when you are 1 away from 3x the threshold you'll have +2 drones everywhere. For the most part it's a pretty soft cap on difficulties other than Transcend unless you are trying to do max ICS from the start of the game.

 

[Space Satan]

There's only one thing that discouraged me from liking AС the most - mindworms. Not erly mindworms,but late-game ones. When some line is crossd they just spawn constantly in absurd numbers. At some point you just start ignoring the game and constantly fight mindworms...and that is with hybrid forest farm and eco build. Simply because mineral threshold for mineral production and pollution goes nuts and you cannot cotrol it ин any means other than killing worms.
Even with that I cannot count how many hours I sink to AC.

 

[Average Manatee]

The trick to mindworms late game is artillery. It bypasses psi combat and just deals damage, then your units can easily win in psi combat. IMO the most annoying part is just that the mindworm pops will destroy your improvements and force you to re-terraform.

I think you should generally be fine with forests?

The Eco Damage formula IS absolutely fucked up and makes no sense but you can avoid having it everywhere. I usually only have it at my capital which is where I'm crawling in a lot more minerals for the purposes of SP production.

 

[Space Satan]

I don't mind fighting huge stacks of mindworms. From time to time. But when you fight them EVERY TURN popping about 20 or so near every major city. It is just becoming tedious and boring.

 

[Silva]

Being frank, SMAC has aged badly in some aspects, specially micromanagent. It's something that made me back off entirely from the Civ formula in recent years. These days I manage only the first two or three bases and everything beyond goes on automate (just like attackfighter cites above). The exception being base facilities and specialists, but even that only for the half dozen core ones.

But the worst aspect is war. I DREAD vendettas. I'm okay with it in early game because there's few bases so it usually ends fast. But from mid to late game it's a chore. Because of that I developed a "turtle rich" playstyle where I try to get rich on my corner while befriending everyone, and when people declare vendettas on me I just buy their units and bases through probe teams until they give up (Morgan and Roze are good for this). That's why I always play on Normal map size. I would go insane if vendetta'd by some strong opponent on a very large map in mid/late-game.

I hope the eventual remake have decent automation functions and AI, specially for war. I'd love to build a "task force" of sorts and just designate target region for the AI to conquer. EDIT: if theres something like this right now that I'm missing, lemme know.

 

[Silva]

Induktio , I suggest tweaking the AI against this diplo option:

"Please drop the vendetta against my friend X"

..to which they usually respond

"So be it. As a personal favor to you I shall pledge Truce with X"

It's cheesy as fuck as the AI accepts it every time. I suggest making the AI charge an amount of credits based on it's relationship with the player to accept the request, and deny it altogether if the vendetta is considered a priority in it's strategy. Don't know if it's moddable, though.

 

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

If/When you get to see other civs post their maps. I'd be interested to see how well Thinker develops cities when it has tons of room to grow and not much pressure from neighbors

Will do.
I bet the AI has some humongous huge nations.
I found a Unity Rover recently and I am teching up to Rovers (really shouldn't forgotten to set off Blind Research lol), I think I will find someone else in the next decade (Morganites, likely).

Does Thinker change Blind Research, btw?

Morganites are the closest civ to me, I suspect they are on my continent, but not sure.

Spartans are weakest, I suspect they either got a shit landing position or got rekt.
My Hive is Second-Weakest, but the Fifty-Year Plan will ensure that THE HUMAN HIVE IS THE STRONGEST HUMAN CIVLIZATION IN THE GALAXY!
All thanks to Sheng-ji Yang Thought, of course.

I am playing at max native life, I'm not sure how Thinker does with it, but seems to be doing well, judging by how the game seems to show the AI is ahead of me.

 

[Silva]

Anybody else noticed Datajack Roze has a +1 Planet rating by default? Is this intended or a Thinker bug? EDIT: I started a new game and it's gone now. Probably some bug in the previous game. Weird.

 

[Average Manatee]

Anybody else noticed Datajack Roze has a +1 Planet rating by default? Is this intended or a Thinker bug? EDIT: I started a new game and it's gone now. Probably some bug in the previous game. Weird.

There is a map feature that can provide that if you have it in your territory I think. You might have had that?

EDIT: Manifold Nexus https://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Landmarks

 

[Silva]

Oh yeah, it was the Manifold Nexus in my territory. Shit I didn't know that existed. Thanks!

By the way, any tips for automating stuff? The micro is killing me these days.